“Forget you——” The words escaped him in a sort of wonder. They stood motionless, eyes fixed upon one another, and into the faces of each there stole an impatient bewilderment. They had leaped to the peaks of poetry and youth’s dreams for a few lambent hours, and now the peaks were far away again. Veiled in the clouds of awakened scepticism and analysis, the peaks were higher than before, and their aspect had forever changed.
A tremor passed in the air between them. Knifing across it came the stab of the doorbell—anticlimax of everyday routine cutting the wheels of drama from under. Few can stand the swift descent. Joy hesitated, then came forward. Grant hastily captured his hat, which had rolled to the hall floor some time ago, and stood brushing off the dust of which there was a disgraceful amount.
As the door swung open both fell back in different reactions. Jim Dalton stood on the threshold.
“Good evening, Miss Nelson,” he smiled. “I——” His glance travelled past her to Grant.
“This seems to be Miss Nelson’s evening at home,” Grant said evenly. “Good-bye, Joy.”
She watched him signal for the elevator, still brushing the dust from his hat. Grant would probably be a masculine replica of his mother when he was her age——
Jim did not speak until the elevator had sunk from sight. “I was—passing by—and saw the sixth story light on—so I took the chance of interrupting a party.”
“There was no party, as you see,” Joy answered. Her resentment against this man had long since died—had died with her regard for Grant—and instead she felt something she told herself was not quite positive enough to be pleasure. “Do come in; I think it was very nice of you to take this chance. You see,” she continued as she led the way to the living room for the second time in that half hour, “you see. I have had no chance—to thank you for anything.”
“I hate to be thanked,” he said quickly. “There’s no more futile feeling than teetering on one’s toes through anything like that—it makes one feel like such a fool—and then simpering, ‘Oh, please don’t mention it!’ Oh, please, Miss Nelson, don’t make me say that!”
He was talking away from the subject, and she made no further attempt to express her gratitude; words on anything touching that night came with difficulty. He was not looking at her with such persistency that she remembered that her hair was still flowing down her back, scattering hairpins hither and yon. She anchored her arms to her sides against the involuntary hands-flying-to-hair-motion. That would spell a self-conscious guilt. No, she would leave it that way, and he would think she was wearing it unconfined because she had just washed it, or thought it was good for it, or something.